Recent Fire Showed Value of Brush-Clearing Program : Environment: A county program forces 22,000 property owners a year to clear vegetation away from structures.

Though a scary reminder of the catastrophic Oakland Hills wildfire, the flames that swept across brushy hillsides in North Ranch last week carried a message tailor-made to Bill Wright’s purposes.

Wright, a 30-year firefighter, directs a Ventura County program that forces 22,000 property owners a year to clear brush and weeds away from structures.

About 1,000 owners fight the weed-abatement orders or ignore them, and end up paying about $1 million annually after the county does the job for them.

“It becomes almost a personal thing,” Wright said. “Some of them feel you don’t have a right to do something like this.”

But Wright’s program was the hero last week.

Firefighters used a swath of cleared hillside behind a row of Hillcrest Drive condominiums to stage their counterattack against a wind-whipped fire that had sped past them once and threatened to destroy many homes.

“We fired out from there,” Wright said.

With room to maneuver, firefighters set their own blazes, which were sucked up the hillside by the vacuum of the oncoming wildfire.

“The two fires burned together, and then didn’t have fuel, so they stopped,” Wright said.

Even as last Wednesday’s fire was being contained, residents of the North Ranch Village condominiums seemed to recognize the significance of what was taking place.

“It’s a good thing the gardeners cut that brush,” said Brian Chapman, a Los Angeles police detective, as firefighters doused flames near his condo.

A day after the fire, Wright examined 150 acres of charred hillsides and ridgelines and pointed out areas where the fire had stopped as it approached houses--blocked in part by 100-foot-wide, weed-free buffers.

“That particular house there, we fought with them to put in that break,” Wright said. “And now, 20-some years later, it pays off.”

A heightened awareness of the importance of weed abatement is usually a byproduct of a bad fire or close call, Wright said.

That was the case after the 1990 Painted Cave Fire in Santa Barbara, which destroyed more than 500 structures, and after the recent Oakland Hills inferno, which killed 24 and destroyed 2,700 homes.

“One of the things that happened in Oakland, and happens here, is that people are living with the idea, ‘We don’t have fires here.’ And they usually don’t,” Wright said. “But all you need is something like this, and then people realize.”

Even before last week’s North Ranch fire, fire stations in the Thousand Oaks area were getting calls from residents concerned that the Oakland tragedy could be repeated in Ventura County, Wright said.

Firefighter Steve Wark of the Lake Sherwood station made that point last Thursday when Wright stopped at a house fire in Westlake.

“You should have heard the calls we got the other day,” Wark said after poking his head into Wright’s pickup truck. “They said, ‘Oakland burned. Are we going to burn?’ That sells your program, though, Billy.”

But fear recedes once the fire season passes. And Wright, head of the weed-abatement program for eight years, must start all over again next spring.

During its push last spring, the county Fire Department sent 20,631 notices to property owners whose weed problems had been documented by firefighters from the county’s 32 stations.

About 95% of owners cleared their property within the 30-day limit or soon afterward, avoiding penalties.

But 993 balked and ended up paying $688,000 to reimburse the county for weed removal by contractors. They also paid $219,232--or $221 each--in administrative fees. The levies were added to property tax bills.

In September, the Fire Department sent another 1,429 notices to owners of property where drying tumbleweeds were considered a fire hazard. About 50% have responded so far, Wright said.

The county’s fastest-growing areas, especially the dry hills of the eastern county, have had the worst weed and brush problems, he said.

“As we get more population, the people are right in the brush,” Wright said.

While hundreds of people ignore cleanup notices, or say they never received them, about two dozen a year lodge formal protests, Wright said. Of those, the county adjusts the bills of about half. But three or four are appealed to the County Board of Supervisors, he said.

In one case last spring, a Simi Valley church appealed a $2,487 bill and gained a $1,000 reduction after Supervisor Vicky Howard intervened on its behalf.

A seven-person crew cleared the church property by hand because Wright said he feared that a tractor would break waterlines. “We didn’t want to do any damage (to the lines), but evidently we were wrong,” he said.

Another appeal reached the supervisors two weeks ago. A property owner in the Upper Ojai claimed his $921 bill was unfair because he didn’t know he had to clear weeds from around his garage. But the man failed to appear and lost his appeal.

Wright said owners often insist that they have received no notice because they do not see weeds as a threat and think abatement is unnecessary.

“You can go out on a nice spring day and not see a threat of anything,” Wright said. “But people could be living in that garage, and if there is a fire, it just goes up.”